Call of Duty is the Coca-Cola of Video Games

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Contrarian Corner takes on Black Ops.

By Michael Thomsen

Contrarian Corner takes a critical look at recent games, with the intention of encouraging a broader discussion of titles which have been the recipient of either an abundance of single-minded praise, or an undue amount of criticism. If you're interested in joining that discussion, keep reading.

And make sure to read Nate Ahearn's Call of Duty: Black Ops review for IGN's official thoughts on the game. Be forewarned -- if you haven't finished the game, spoilers will be discussed below.

It's said that William Golding on hearing the news that Lord of the Flies had earned a place on the New York Times Best Seller list wondered aloud, "What did I do wrong?" The tension between what compels a creator to work and the meaning her audience takes from that creation is inescapable. With video games, creators are bound by the narrow genre expectations of experienced players, too often forced to abandon their work as it transubstantiates into an "Intellectual Property." Such is the case of Call of Duty, which began as a derivative of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan--a hero fairytale with a stunning foreground of spilled guts and wails of the suddenly limbless.

Call of Duty games traumatized players without mercy, the sound effects were alarmingly realistic and overwhelming, the visual feedback of being shot was a screen-shaking red blur that combined with the audio to recreate a genuine sense of emotional horror--the momentary panic of realizing your body was being torn apart by the distant machinery of a stranger in a uniform. After decades of dishonest mythologizing of World War II Call of Duty revivified it in terms of human suffering and endurance.

Miraculously--and tragically--Call of Duty games are still with us a decade later, long after they've run out of anything substantively new to share. Their technology is newer and prettier, and they now have an insidious multiplayer mode that combines shock therapy with slot machine compulsion, but they remain the same mechanical essence year after year: overwhelming amounts of enemies, sensationally scripted events, and an unforgiving sense of trauma for those who lose. Call of Duty: Black Ops is this year's model of the trauma simulator. In many ways it has drifted into an area that is the exact opposite of what the series stood for when it began.

Black Operations are certain secret CIA programs so sensitive they can't be publicly admitted. John Kennedy's disastrous authorizing of a CIA-led coup attempt in Cuba immediately following Fidel Castro's coup is perhaps the best known of these "operations" and the precipice from which Treyarch, in partnership with Dark City and Batman screenwriter David Goyer, leap into the waiting arms of the audience. In brief, the dramatic arc involves a secret plot between Castro and a Soviet super villain with "Dragon" in his surname to capture a biological weapon the Nazis developed in the Arctic Circle during World War II. In the same way that Infinity Ward couldn't conceive of any real modern threat that wasn't a product of Communists, Treyarch seems quite unwilling to let go of the moral voodoo doll of Nazism.

Players control a briefly amnesiac agent who wakes up in a computerized crypt speaking to a distorted voice on a loudspeaker that demands to know what a sequence of random-seeming numbers means. Each level is a step-by-step retracing of the agent's adventures under the diplomatic radar as he strains to keep the Nazi artifact out of Communist hands, eventually reaching the crescendo where he realizes what the numbers mean. This frees him to regroup with his colleagues for one last raid on the floating Communist super station where the biological weapons are drifting 90 miles south of American border.

The story is told with paranoia and fearful insecurity characteristic of the Cold War. With the privilege of history there's a reasonable case to be made that the CIA got many of the most important questions wrong. In the case of Vietnam, the CIA both accelerated the rise of Ho Chi Minh and prolonged American involvement in the war against him long after it became clear he was more of a nationalist than a Communist satellite. Even the most forgiving assessment of the CIA's 60 year history can only go so far as to argue they had good intentions and were fighting for the lesser of two bad outcomes--wrestling with political problems that could not have a simple, peaceful solution.

Treyarch's last Duty game, World at War, incorporated this world view and the network of terrible ironies it contains. Its closing missions with vengeful Soviets tearing into Berlin are alive with bitterness and moral paradox. The war might well have been lost without the Russians, and their losses from German invasion could be taken as excuse for pitiless revenge. But to have a hand--or bayonet--in that cruelty was awful, with or without justification. Those closing events don't feel noble or moral. In Black Ops Treyarch dodges all of the hard questions about its subject and instead hides them behind the all-forgiving curtain of Nazis. Killing for any other reason would be less fun, and fun has apparently trumped moral paradox.